I was analyzing a couple of sites today as I was researching a few new niches. I was looking at the link building niches like, link building services, link building software and things like that. I noticed a few interesting things when I closely inspected the backlinks of these two sites. I don't want to name the sites because I'm not sure the owners would be thrilled with that, so no names. Suffice it to say I was in particular looking at the link building services niche.

One of the sites I was examining was that of a well known link building expert. Definitely not a house hold name but in the seo and internet marketing community this guy is "a name" player. He is a totally white hat seo kind of guy and on his site he warns the readers about shady link building services and techniques. He talks about how "the other" guys take short cuts and don't do this and that. It's evident that he practices what he preaches if you look at his links.

The other site I was analyzing was in the number one position right above our white hat friend. This site just talked about link building and how important it is. It didn't really get into how they will avoid taking short cuts or warn others about shady tactic, but at the same time they seemed like a pretty white hat seo service too. Not as white hat as the well known expert but white hat enough. Their backlinks were distinctly different that the other fellow and I'll explain how.

The well known white hat guy had great links! He had links from authority sites in his niche which is link building. Big plus right there! He had do follow links from sites like Search Engine Journal and SEO Book. Top notch trusted sites. However his anchor texts were all over the place. He had hardly any anchors for the term he was competing for which is 'link building services.' Strange as usually you need to have good anchored links to rank for a keyword that is so competitive like that.

The links he did have were from pages and sites that were very topically relevant. The page titles that linked to this site were about link building services and the links were sometimes in the content as well as on the sidebar. The last thing I want to say about our famous friends site is that it is quite old. I believe it was a 1996 or 1997. Age plays a huge factor in trust.

Our other site, the top ranking site was only 18 months old yet it ranked number one! Upon inspecting the backlinks I saw that they used lots of focused anchored links. They had a ton of links anchored with "Link Building Services" and all sorts of varieties on that. The pages that the links were coming from were relevant but not as much so as the other guys site. There were many links that came from generic pages as well yet they all had keyword focused anchored links.

In conclusion this shows you that links from topically relevant pages mean a whole lot and that google knows that your site is about "x" if the sites linking to it are about "x" even if you don't exactly have "x" in your anchored links. However, the number one site managed to take over that position in 18 months (compared to the famous guys site which is 12 years old) with lots of anchored links. So the ultimate in linking therefore seems to be anchored links from relevant sites and pages.

Most people know that already but I had never seen it so clearly and interesting presented as I did in comparing those two sites. I also find it interesting how different techniques achieve similar results. No doubt about it though that building anchored links is the quickest way to get there.